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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

This is something I wrote for an American magazine about Fallas. Why they published it in June instead of March is beyond my comprehension. I think that I have been a good ambassador for Spain in the things I have written but most of what I write and publish is just stupid shit that makes me laugh.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

I posted this after someone posted some lame thing about how her kid is being bullied and how if you want to stand by her sissy kid you should LIKE the post, as if all the world's problems can be fixed with LIKEs on Facebook. Why don't we just LIKE away cancer and war and genital herpes while we're at it? No one got my attempt at humor but fuck them; I thought it was funny.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Another
police reign of terror to end the bicycle reign of terror, the second in as
many years. In this case it’s like using a steam roller to kill an ant and begs
the question of just what is the problem the city of Valencia is hoping to
solve. The police actually call this an “information campaign” with the punch-line
being a fine of 200€. Three marauders were cited for not having bells on their
bikes. Thank god the police are protecting the citizenry from these animals.

The
worst thing about this anti-cycling campaign is that most of the people in
Valencia seem to be in favor of it or at least acquiescent. This is what I take
from the tone of the articles appearing in Valencia’s two daily newspapers and
from the television coverage on the local news. There was no shortage of people
voicing their concern over the outrageous and deadly behavior of the city’s
bike riders.It’s easy enough to find
footage of cyclists breezing through red lights at deserted intersections or
riding down sidewalks but it’s another thing to actually find a problem with
this behavior. Put a camera at any intersection of the city and you will
witness some pretty brutish driving habits that seem to be accepted techniques
by the police. Wait for a light to turn yellow and you will see a line of cars
gunning it to screech through while cars waiting on the opposing lane roll
through the light before it has even changed to green. Most drivers watch the
flashing green pedestrian signal and use that as their green light. Yesterday I
was almost run over by a city bus using this tactic. I pointed to the red light while scowling at the driver.

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cyclists were fined for chaining their murderous machines to trees or lamp
posts, something strictly forbidden under the new decree drafted in 2010,
obviously by people who never cycle. When called on this stupid prohibition one
of the PP functionaries commented that the city has generously provided 4,000
bike parking spaces throughout the city, a city of almost a million people. Do
the math while you scour the city for a place to leave your bike. Once again, just what problem does the city want to solve by this law? And it’s not
like chaining your bike will do any good as bike theft seems to be a perfectly legal
and respected profession from the way local police ignore it completely.

There
were nine infractions of cyclists dragging unauthorized loads behind their
bikes which is simply code for singling out gypsies who improvise trailers for
their bikes in their search for chatarra and other riches stolen from
trash containers throughout the city. One man’s garbage is another man’s food
for the day. It reminds me of the Anatole France quote from Le Lys Rouge:
La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de
coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain (in its majestic equality, the law
forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and
stealing loaves of bread.)

The message the city is sending to
the people of Valencia could not be clearer: you shouldn’t ride a bicycle and
if you do you will be held to a standard far higher than that expected of
automobiles. It doesn’t matter that no one has been killed by a cyclist while cyclists
and pedestrians are run down like dogs by motorists. I would be grateful if the
local police would enforce a single traffic law: the maximum speed limit of 50
kph in the city.

Saturday, June 08, 2013

On the back cover of a travel memoir of Italy it said that the author was a gourmet cook. The first
thing that came to my mind was that she may have qualified as a gourmet cook
somewhere in the world but among the Italians she probably rated in the bottom
middle of household hash slingers, not exactly the sort of recommendation that
would sell many books. She may be
considered a gourmet cook among people who value concepts like “delivered in 30
minutes or it’s free” but from the recipes in her book I didn’t get the
impression that she was creating any miracles in the kitchen. This isn’t trying
to take anything away from the skills of the American author it’s just that in
Mediterranean countries the bar for culinary prowess has been raised rather
high. Like being a distance runner in Kenya, to be considered an above average cook
in this region of the world you have to be truly remarkable.

There are a few factors that
contribute to the high level of sophistication among Mediterranean home chefs
with tradition being the first course.Most families have a repertoire of local dishes that serve as the menu
for a lifetime, a repertoire that also served as the menu of the previous
generation and further back in time. What people eat can be as iconic as the local
architecture, language, and landscape.Their food provides them with sustenance as well as an identity.I can think of no better example of this than
paella valenciana, perhaps one of the
world’s most famous and recognizable dishes. The humble Greek peasant salad or
horiatiki is another example of a dish that identifies and unifies both the
Greek mainland as well as the islands.You
have pastas in Italy, luxurious sauces of wine and butter in France, couscous
in Moroccan and Tunisian, and dozens of other foods strung up around the Mediterranean
coast like a barbed wire fence separating them from the countries not blessed
with fine cuisine.

Another factor that weighs
heavily in favor of the Mediterranean diet is the high quality of the
ingredients, many of which are native to the region. It’s almost impossible to
overestimate the roll wine and olives have played in the kitchens here over the
past few thousand years, things which have only caught on in the past 30-40
years in the rest of the western world. These are things we all take for
granted today but couldn’t be found to far away from the shores of the Middle White
Sea as the Arabs call it.

They also have a heavy reliance
on seasonal products unique to the region.Throughout most of the Mediterranean basin you eat what is in season and
if it is not in season you eat something else.Different varieties of fruits and vegetables ripen at different times of
the year and this is when you incorporate them greedily into your cooking.

When Americans are asked what we
eat it’s like a pop quiz that we haven’t studied for in a class we didn’t even
know we were taking.Few of us have been
inculcated into a heritage of a local cuisine. We’ve recently come out of a
generation or two in which home cooking was actually looked down upon as something
not suitable for men and demeaning to women. That’s a tough situation to navigate
when you consider that we all must eat every day. We were told that we didn’t have time to cook.
We should remember never to listen to people selling toaster waffles and
microwave pizza rolls. Cooking around
the Mediterranean is like hockey is for Canadians or NASCAR is to southerners
so the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do in the kitchen.

I think that with the explosion
of cooking shows on television and YouTube recipes we—American men and
women—have finally started to embrace the kitchen.If anything we’ve swung too far in the other
direction becoming a bunch of insufferable food snobs haughtily insisting on
balsamic vinegar, organic produce, Kalamata olives, and Rioja wine, things we
hardly knew existed only a few short years ago. Eating well shouldn’t be a
luxury or something one group of people holds over the head of another; it
should be the goal of all of us.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

I’m sure you’ve heard this one many times before,
a fiction that has
racked up some serious mileage on the internet about some old gal who goes
into a liquor store and is rebuked by a fabricated “young cashier” for not
using recyclable bags when she makes her weekly purchase of 22 bottles of cheap
gin. Then the figment of someone’s imagination older woman goes on to lecture
the young socialist about how green she was a million years ago when she was
young and what a solipsistic ass-wipe the young cashier is and how she should
mind her own business and go back to Cuba.

But who created the world in which this haughty
young cashier lives? Who built the world where you need a car to effect every
necessity away from your home, where public transportation is looked upon as a
socialist plot? Who created a disposable culture in which we use about a
zillion paper coffee cups a day and single-serve plastic bottles of water? The
alcoholic granny had more to do with making that world than a minimum wage
liquor store clerk —or at least acquiescing to its implementation, and sorry
grandma, the Nuremberg defense won't work.Her generation also gave away American manufacturing jobs so that about
the only work this kid can hope for are shitty and demeaning jobs without
benefits where you have to bite your tongue when some sanctimonious cow goes on
about how her generation was so much better than the snot-nosed little shits of
today.

The subtext here is that anyone who talks about
the environment is an over-privileged, know-nothing wiseass who deserves a
smack across the face after you set them straight about the way the world
really is according to Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and other high priests of
simplemindedness, people for whom “environmental wacko” and eco-terrorist” are
synonyms for anyone who even hints at actually doing something to clean up our
planet because some nut who chains himself to an old-growth redwood is a lot
more dangerous than the logging company bent on chopping down every last one of
them to make patio furniture.

I would imagine that the people this phony little
anecdote appeals to are those who support political candidates who wouldn’t
back a single environmental initiative, even something as basic as the
protected species act. This is basic conservative propaganda whose sole purpose
is to make people feel good about themselves for holding on to their
narrow-minded and often dangerous world view when it flies in the face of
reality.

Had this really happened I would have applauded the old drunk had she told the clerk to go take a flying fuck but it isn't a true story, of course it isn't. So granny, the next time you visit the liquor bargain warehouse
shut your fat cake hole and bring a reusable bag.

Monday, June 03, 2013

As I pedal my way out of a winter
in which I gained a few kilos and into a summer where I’m trying to reach a
level of fitness like never before, I’m using all of the weapons in my arsenal. I
have recently dusted off my heart rate monitor which I haven’t used in a long
time. I never really used it seriously in the past. I would simply wear it from
time to time; it was more of a fashion accessory than a tool for training.I have strung together a few weeks of
spectacular training rides during which I’ve only missed three days of riding
and on those off days I was still riding the Valenbisi bikes around town like I
was being chased by the police. I’ve also been watching what I eat. Notice that
I didn’t say “dieting” as I’m simply trying to eat less of whatever it is I
feel like eating. To complete my fitness tower I have decided to do something
drastic, even if it’s just temporary.

I am beginning Operation Zero Tolerance in which I will
give up drinking beer (and by beer I mean alcohol). Gulp. There, I said it. As
I said in the previous paragraph, I don’t know how long this beer-less state of
being will endure but it has begun. It’s not like I have seen god but more like
I would like to see myself looking better at the beach in a couple of weeks.

I don’t own a scale and don’t
really believe much in them but I have definitely trimmed down quite a bit. A
scale wouldn’t tell me much as I have also put on a bit of upper-body muscle
mass with my routine of pull-ups and push-ups. I'm sure that this isn't news to anyone but as you get older you put on weight like a school bus picking up the kids but getting the little shits off the bus becomes more and more of a problem.

A fringe benefit of so much time
spent cycling is that I have gone through more than a dozen audio books in the
past month.

Saturday, June 01, 2013

I realize that a post like this
will tend to make me even less popular than I already am in the blogging world
(whatever the fuck that is) but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for as
long as I have read blogs.If you would like me to link your blog here just email me. All I ask is that you update fairly regularly.

1) No one really gives a big shit that you haven’t posted in a while so
stop writing a post to apologize “to your readers” for the fact that you haven’t
written anything in months. Either write
more or shut up about not writing because I’m pretty sure that nobody really
cares whether you write something or not.

2) Does anyone ever make money on blog ads? Why would you pollute your
blog with advertisements when you are only going to make a few pennies? If you
are making decent money then go on but I doubt that there are many bloggers
that can say this.So just write for the
joy of writing and throw Google’s pennies back in their fat faces.

That's all I can think of, just two things. I still read lots of blogs and I'm always looking for something good. My only advice to bloggers is to
keep writing even if no one else is reading. You will never get actual advice on writing from me because that would be like me talking about astrology or tarot cards reading. If you can monetize your writing
then good for you. I actually make a very modest sum from writing but that’s
hardly my motivation. I do it for me.

P.S. I just thought of something else: excessive comment moderation procedures. Do you want people to leave comments of not? I've simply given up trying to comment on most blogs because it's just too much trouble. I could understand this on blogs that get hundreds of comments but if you only get a handful why not just allow comments with no hoops to jump through and then just moderate them yourself? I moderate comments that are from posts more than two weeks old because those are all spam comments, or almost all of them. And what an odd marketing strategy for a company, "I'll just post comments in blog posts from three years ago. Business will go through the roof!"